


her bright reflection

by Anonymous



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Mission Fic, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-30
Updated: 2016-12-30
Packaged: 2018-09-13 11:13:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9121081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Steve and Peggy blow up a bridge.  Romantically.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lotsofthinkythoughts (Mianna)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mianna/gifts).



> happy steggy secret santa, @lotsofthinkythoughts! Hope you enjoy some skinny!Steve and Peggy adventures!

Steve breathes shallowly, listening to Peggy beside him. It’s a quiet night and cold, the kind of crisp chill that carries sound miles over snow. It could just be them in the whole world except for the muffled sounds in the distance.

He glances over at her, beautiful in the starlight. She looks back, eyes crinkled at the corners and her perfect bow lips pressed tight where she’s trying not to smile. Her red lipstick’s nearly black in the dark, secret and devastating.

“Ready, Rogers?” she says quietly, wetting her lips as she looks him up and down. Steve still thrills at that look more than he should, more than’s decent at a time like this, and she knows it, giving him that secret smile when they both know exactly what’s coming.

“Ready, Peg,” Steve says, giving her a sharp nod as he checks the anchor one last time.

The sound of the German patrol on the road below is clear as day, swinging back to change at the guardhouse Peggy and Steve had snuck by an hour before to climb up and plant the explosives. Not the best of timing, but they need to blow the bridge before the approaching convoy gets close enough to cause even more trouble. Bucky and the Howlies are somewhere up above them, hidden in the trees to either side of the ravine to pick off stragglers.

Peggy glances up at the bridge grating overhead and down to the guardhouse, then back at Steve. Somewhere up there, Bucky and the guys are getting in position to cover them, and little motes of dirt float down around Steve and Peggy where they’re suspended under the bridge decking.

The Peggy leans in, crossing the bare handspan of inches between them to kiss Steve, warm and insistent and perfect. Then she’s gone with a wicked smile, leaning back to let go of her rappel cord and fall into the darkness.

Steve’s a heartbeat behind her, pulse racing from the kiss more than the drop. The detonation cord pulls as his weight drops, the hiss of their rappel cords masked by the first pop of detonation charges. Below him, Peggy’s a dark shape against snow racing away from him.

Steve tucks into a soft landing in snow, snapping off the rappel line and rolling to his feet in one motion, but the patrol’s already seen them. Up ahead, Peggy’s running at a dead sprint towards the sleepy German patrol, and up above them a spotlight’s started to swing across the bridge, chasing the sound of the detonation charges.

Steve lights out after Peggy, putting distance between himself and the bridge pilings. The snow’s tough going, because it’s the kind of crisp, dry snow so cold it squeaks, but Steve bowls over the first Nazi patrolman he meets, throwing him over his shoulder and ducking the wild swing of a rifle butt from the next one, still short enough that everyone underestimates him.

In his peripheral vision Steve sees Peggy punch out first one Nazi and then another with her devastating right hook, but then his attention’s pulled away by a small squad of them pouring out of the guardhouse with those terrible energy packs, the kind that dissolve tanks in a flash of blue light. Up above them, the bridge starts to falter, teetering perilously against a backdrop of stars. Behind him, Peggy’s started something on fire, the dull thump and whoosh of a grenade landing in a truck.

“Steve!” Peggy yells over the roar of diesel fire and gunshots, and when Steve turns towards her, she’s—barreling right at him on a Zündapp, backlit by the burning guardhouse.

Only one thing for it—Steve runs towards her, ducking gunshots as he goes.

One step, two step, Steve goes up and over the sidecar, twisting in air to catch Peggy’s rappel harness before the motorcycle takes her away, and that’s enough to pull him after her, landing him on the seat behind her as they speed past the Germans that’d been behind him. Steve gets off a couple shots with his pistol before Peggy shoulders off her minigun, shoving it at him one handed.

“Time to go,” Peggy yells over the roar of the guardhouse fire, pushing the motorcycle as hard as it’ll go. Steve twists around behind her, firing as they go to cover them as truck beside the guardhouse goes up with a deafening explosion, blister hot against their backs until suddenly the ravine opens up and it’s just them again in the quiet cold. Steve’s ears ring despite the hum of the engine, wrapping himself against Peggy’s back as they speed away over the quiet roads.

At speed the air’s so cold it burns, whipping their breath away until they stash the motorcycle a few miles outside of La Gleize and hoof it the rest of the way to the safe house. In the pale starlight, Peggy’s lipstick is still black as blood, and so’s the dark stain down her left coat sleeve, but she squeezes his hand in hers and just keeps marching on.

The safe house isn’t much to look at it, but that’s the point, a little rundown farm house that looks to have been abandoned at the start of the war, home to mice and probably not much else. Steve and Peggy cut branches from the tree line to cover their tracks, swishing them behind them in the dusty crisp snow to help the wind sweep away their tracks. Steve covers them with his pistol as Peggy heaves up the cellar door, intensely conscious of every muttered sound on the wind and the way the blood down Peggy’s sleeve seems darker than it did before.

Peggy’s down the cellar in a heartbeat, though, and Steve goes behind her, brushing away the last of their tracks and pulling the branches in with them. Once Steve pulls the cellar doors closed behind them, it’s dead quiet except for the sound of Peggy’s breathing and her quiet movements.

Then she’s got a light, the little match in her hand brightening the space as she brings it down to light a kerosene lamp, silhouetted in warm light. Steve lets the heavy curtain hung over the cellar steps fall behind him, dropping his pack as Peg starts the little smokeless heater in the corner.

The cellar’s as cozy as the house above it is ramshackle, no windows to let out light or let in cold, and even the kerosene lamp takes the worst bite of chill out of the air. Steve digs through his pack for gauze and the radio, because the stain down Peg’s coat sleeve is definitely blood. If he’ll heal up from his own scrapes and bruises by morning, Peg sure won’t even if it’s just the graze it looks like.

“I’m fine, Steve,” she protests as he bullies her over to the straw tick in the corner. A shelf stacked with canned food, a heater and a straw tick is all it is, but it’s practically palatial compared to some camps they’ve made in the past year, hunkered down in ditches and hollow trees and abandoned barns.

“I know, just let me worry,” he says.

“Always so dramatic,” Peggy says, but she lets him ease her coat off her even as she fiddles with their wireless like nothing’s wrong.

Steve helps her get her sweater off and then rolls up the sleeve of her thermals as she tunes the radio, listening for Morita’s code in the static chatter. When Steve finally gets a look at her arm, it really is just a graze, nearly clotted up already. Steve wets some gauze with his canteen and dabs around it just to be sure, but it’s nothing more than a few inches long across the curve of her bicep and might not even scar.

“Come in, Cyclone, this is Shield,” Morita says over the wireless after Peggy taps out their confirmation code.

“Shield, this is Cyclone, we’re safe as houses for the night—“

“You fucking— _loons_ —” Bucky sputters as the wireless crackles.

“We had a plan, Barnes,” Peggy says, wincing silently as Steve wraps her arm.

“A plan! A certified Rogers and Carter plan, punch some fucking Nazis in the face and hope there’s a motorcycle around to steal, sounds like a great, well thought out, very detailed plan,” Bucky says.

“It’s called improvisation,” Steve snaps back. “Y’know, like when you threw yourself out of a building with just the shield to land on, Captain America, master of strategy?”

“That was _different_ —”

“G’nite, Buck,” Steve says, and reaches across Peggy to turn off the wireless.

Peggy catches him by the wrist just as he’s sitting back up, holding him there so he can’t help but feel the warmth of her skin. She smells like sweat and ice and hair soap, intoxicating like a hit of whiskey on an empty stomach. Peg combs a hand through his cold hair and Steve leans into it, practically melting into her hands now that the adrenaline high’s starting to wear off. She’s still near a head taller than him but sitting down it’s not such a difference, and she pushes his coat off him with sure hands despite her wrapped arm.

Between their bedrolls and the stack of wool blankets at the foot of the straw tick, they bed down warm once Steve blows the kerosene lamp out and turns the heater down. In the morning they’ll hike out, but in the mean time Steve listens to her breathing in the dark, tucked warm and safe against her. It’s a quiet night and cold, the kind of cozy dark made for sleeping warm and it could be just them.


End file.
